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 into it by the young heroes of the wild Berserker brood from across the North Sea. Had these Saxons and the kindred Danes and Normans, pirates every one, not come, England might have grown learned, and possibly rich; but she could never have become great. She must have lacked manhood and tone. She must have lacked muscle, stomach, and daring. The successive invasions of the northern pirates slowly transformed the race from one of effeminate and disorderly weaklings into one of sternly disciplined men. The raw material may have had some latent stamina; otherwise the bitterness of those north-east blasts would surely have extinguished it altogether. But the stamina required a very long process of development ere it became good for much. It needed many centuries to change the Briton into the Englishman, and during all those centuries, the sea, and the men and influences from across it, did more than any other factors towards completing the transformation.

The so-called Saxon invaders represented at least three tribes. There were the Saxons proper who, originally from Holstein, had spread inland over what are now Hannover and Oldenburg, and had established themselves among the northern Frisian islands. There were the Angles, originally from beyond the Elbe, who had established themselves in what is now Schleswig; and there were the Jutes, probably from the modern Jutland. The British traveller in the Denmark and Holstein of to-day will scarcely fail to be struck with the great general resemblance of the racial type still prevalent in those countries to the type characteristic of eastern and southern England. Nay, he will even find other things to remind him of his native land. In few parts of the world save England and Schleswig-Holstein are hedges an ordinary feature of the rural landscape; and in no non-English speaking community in the world will the Englishman feel so much at home, and so completely able to sympathise with and enter into the habits and ideas of the people, as in this Dano-German district. It is really, as Ethelward, the tenth century chronicler, called it, Anglia Vetus.

All these tribes were piratical, if we use the word in its fullest modern sense; but with them piracy was not a shameful but a noble and dignified employment. The might of Rome had failed to